Re: Need help with picking out a laptop for home use.
My experience has been anything I can get from TigerDirect I can find somewhere else for less money. TigerDirect tends to be a little pricy compared to other online sources.<br /><br />I blew past a CD-RW and opted for a DVD/CD-RW. They also do the CD-RW functions, but allow the laptop to watch movies, and write DVDs. You can write DVD slideshows of digital pix, etc that you can share with anyone that has a DVD player. Not all DVD players will play video CDs (VCD). DVD/CD-RW drives are only a few bucks more than a CD-RW.<br /><br />My laptop does not have a serial port. When I need to access a serial port I use a USB-to-serial cable plugged into the USB port on my laptop and the serial port on whatever.<br /><br />My laptop does not have a firewire (IE 1394) port but then I also dont own anything that uses firewire. If/when I ever do, Ill get a PCMCIA card that has firewire output for $25 or so.<br /><br />If you use wifi you may want to consider a wi-fi a/b/g option for your laptop as opposed to the more common wifi g. Wifi is changing over to a dual-band scenario that uses both the a (5ghz) and the b/g (2.4ghz) spectrums simultaneously. It supports full T100 (100mb) bandwidth for wifi at Ethernet speed.<br /><br />Ethernet is upgrading too. T10/100 is now T10/100/1000, i.e. 1-gb bandwith. Not an issue unless you will be pushing around high bandwidth data (movies with HD video and multi-channel audio) on a LAN.<br /><br />Mrs Rabbit gets paid to destroy. Things that she destroys: power supplies, computers, various office equipment, laptops
A minimum of 16 power supplies are literally destroyed evaluating a single model of power supply, sometimes as many as 20+. Usually laptops are not destroyed and can be returned to the manfr after evaluating, unless there is a design flaw, then it is toast! ... and it never sees the market. There is a world of diff in the build quality of laptops. For build quality, IBM/Lenovo and Fujitsu laptops come to mind. Could be important of you will frequently be going mobile with your laptop. If your laptop will spend most of its life sitting on your desk then its not important.